Memoirs of the almost a year I lasted at Google. The name of that year? 2008. Yeah. Topics include: Third World, precariat, tech elitism, queerness, surveillance, capitalism.
Y’all encouraged me to submit this as a full post, and I clearly overcommited to this blog so I hope TechTakes fits for it lol
Looks like HN found it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44200773
Holy shit the sheer amount of them saying they were confused by how you wrote your article has me rolling. These paragons of intelligence failing at basic reading comprehension.
Hopefully you find their jabbering about it as funny as I did.
I read the comments before the article and I thought I was about to read something with like a complicated narrative framing device but apparently HN chuds cannot disentangle a linear, first-person narrated blog post.
Yeah I’m not thrilled to get that particular type of attention but I knew the risks when I clicked “publish” on that particular topic.
Clicked the link out of curiosity, saw that the top comment was some soothing rationale on how it’s not unethical to force 3rd world people to clean up after you (under the threat of starvation on the streets) as long as you say good evening to them that makes you a nice guy, then closed the tab again. My weekend is better off not reading the orange site, but even though I wasn’t aiming for a particularly literary or poetic form in this piece, it’s still a type of validation to know that Scott Alexander readers can’t parse my essay style.
A surprising number of the commenters seem to be at least considering the intended message… which makes the contrast of the number of comments failing at basic reading comprehension that much more absurd (seriously, it’s absurd how many comments somehow missed that the author was living in and working from Brazil and felt it didn’t reflect badly on them to say as much in the HN comments).
“Funny” is one way to put it.
At least the lone crypto bro is getting appropriately roasted. They’re capable of learning.